sustainability Archives - Page 4 of 10

SAP are now starting to let their customers tell their Sustainability story

May 20, 2011 by Tom Raftery

Centrica's Smart Meter Analytics implementation

I attended SAP’s SapphireNow conference this week. At previous Sapphire conferences SAP went strong on Sustainability – having guest speakers like Al Gore and Richard Branson and also having both Co-CEO’s address the topic strongly in their talks. This year however, they went a different route.

This year the main themes discussed by guests and Co-CEO’s were mobility and in-memory computing with sustainability merely referenced a couple of times in passing. On the other hand, a search of the online agenda shows that there were 60 sessions at the event which were Sustainability themed. What’s more, as SAP’S VP Marketing for Sustainability Solutions Marty Etzel pointed out to me, 80% of those sessions were customer or partner led.

I think it shows a certain maturity and confidence by SAP that they are willing to step back from the previous top-down approach to Sustainability that they have espoused and to allow their customers and partners to bottom-up tell the story on their behalf. It is always a far more convincing story when it is your partners and customers are talking up your solutions.

Due to meetings, I couldn’t get to as many of the sessions as I wanted to but fortunately many of them were recorded for replay on the SapphireNow so I’ll be able to catch up with them over the coming days.

It is a gutsy move by SAP to let their customers tell their Sustainability story – but it is one which is vital for the credibility of their solutions.

Disclosure – SAP paid my travel and expenses to attend this event

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SAP’s 2010 Sustainability Report demo’d

May 6, 2011 by Tom Raftery

I had a Skype chat recently with SAP’s Chief Sustainability Officer Peter Graf where he gave me a demo of their new 2010 Sustainability report.

With Peter’s permission, I recorded the demo for publication on YouTube. The video above is the result and the transcription is below.

Some highlights Peter mentioned include:

More sustainable operations have saved SAP ?170 million (!) between 2008 and today,
SAP are updating their Sustainability report quarterly and are embedding it more and more closely with their financial reporting and,
SAP have deep social media embedding in their report

With this report, SAP have put clear blue water between themselves and any other sustainability report. SAP can still take it up another few notches (productising it, putting an api in front of it, publishing in xbrl, etc) but this is the kind of reporting everyone needs to be moving to, as a baseline. Kudos to SAP for once again setting the bar with this report.

Now here’s the transcription of the demo:

Tom Raftery: Hi, everyone. Welcome to GreekMonk TV. We are talking today to SAP?s Chief Sustainability Officer, Peter Graf, who is going to give us a quick demo of the new 2010 SAP Sustainability Report.

Peter Graf: So, this is SAP?s 2010 Sustainability Report, which people can find online at sapsustainabilityreport.com. The report lays out the three key areas of impact for SAP. In the first place, SAP wants to become a more sustainable company, so we are talking about our own sustainability performance. The second section of the report is about how SAP helps customers to run more profitably and sustainably, so that?s mostly a conversation about our applications and software solutions.

And then finally, there is a section on how people at SAP drive opportunity for others through IT. And then, certainly the last part, as always when we put our report on the line is that encouraging into action and dialog between us and those who come and visit the report. And we call that section Do Your Part and that describes how everyone can contribute.

Tom Raftery: Great. Can you show me some of the details of how SAP have done in the last year? How does it look onscreen, because it?s very different from any other sustainability report that?s out there?

Peter Graf: Exactly. So before we go there, the data that we talk about is all assured by KPMG, and there are two levels of assurance and yes, this report is A+ from GRI perspective. It?s got the best rating that you can get from GRI. It complies with a whole variety of standards, but most importantly, we have not only done limited assurance to our greenhouse gas numbers, we?ve actually gone for reasonable assurance, meaning the assurance company actually assures that this is really our footprint. And we do that because we believe in the future there will be much more scrutiny around how people are reporting greenhouse gas emissions.

And that?s what the greenhouse gas emissions look like. You can see the trend from 2000 to 2007; we?ve always increased our emissions. In 2007, we set ourselves the goal to reduce our emissions step-by-step back to the level of 2000 by the year 2020, so we have an absolute carbon target. That is pretty aggressive considering that in 2000, we had about 24,000 employees and already today in 2011, we have more than 50,000 employees and we want to obviously continue to grow as a company.

You can also see that we have kind of flipped the chart to kind of visually highlight that emissions are seen as a liability to SAP so they show below the line.

Tom Raftery: And clicking on any of those bars redraws the kind of pie chart on the right?

Peter Graf: Exactly, so you can go and drill into the different years and you can see how the emissions change. For example in 2008, we had 31% of our emissions from flights that also tells you that we include Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions in our calculation.

That number dropped dramatically in 2009, given that in the times of economic crisis, we just don?t service as many customers, so you can see that here. And then in 2010, the number continues in absolute terms to be reduced, which is amazing given that we have actually increased our revenues by 17% in 2010 while reducing our emissions. You can see that very nicely when you look at the carbon emissions on a Euro basis. We are now at 33.9 grams per Euro revenue and in 2008, that number was 45.6 grams.

So, in terms of carbon efficiency we have dramatically accelerated and you can drill into different areas. For example, revenue in the Americas, you can actually go and look at different scopes and include or exclude them in the competition. So that?s the benefit of having this kind of interactivity.

Tom Raftery: The obvious question that comes to mind then is, if you are spending all this money on getting carbon out of your system, out of your organization, it must be costing the company a small fortune.

Peter Graf: Yeah, that?s the secret sauce I would say, because what we do at SAP is from the carbon perspective, we have a very, very good idea about where we need to kind of have activity in order to have a positive financial impact. So, here you see the SAP specific abatement cost curve that we have, which is produced with the help of SAP carbon impact and you can see, for example, for every ton of carbon that we avoid using video conferencing, the company saves ?654 and there are 39,000 tons that we can abate that way. So, the width of every one of those rectangles describes how much carbon we can save, the height describes the financial impact.

We have done an analysis in terms of a business as usual case, so we extrapolated our carbon performance from the 2000 to 2009 further into the future in the business as usual case and in comparison to that business as usual case Tom, we saved ?170 million. So, 170 — so it looks like this is expensive stuff, but in reality for us, we live the sustainability business case and we are bringing in savings by becoming more energy efficient.

Tom Raftery: So, you are also going beyond not just in terms of presentation and interactivity, but you are also going beyond what most of the companies are doing as well by reporting not just once a year or not just once every two years as some companies are doing, but once every quarter?

Peter Graf: That?s correct. And we?ve just announced our first quarter results. We have a 6% increase in carbon for the first quarter of 2011, which we can easily track to a 5% increase in employees and we have had a very, very good performance last year in terms of carbon, so we need to keep on our toes and do the right things.

I want to highlight one element which is our increasing renewable energy, which went from 16% to 48% last year globally. Again, you can see the type of charts we used. Below the line, we have fossil and nuclear sources for electricity; above the line, we have renewable sources like wind and hydro. So there is a big shift going on between 2009 and 2010, how we source our electricity and the beauty of this chart, below the chart we show how we do less bad and above the chart we show how we do more good and the change is pretty significant.

I mean, look in 2009, we had probably 16% total renewables and the number has grown so much. While in addition, the absolute number of gigawatt hours of electricity we consume has been reduced to 268 from 301. So, our strategy is to reduce the distance from this point to that point and at the same time shift the whole thing up.

Tom Raftery: Are you doing any — or have you plans to do any integration with your financial reporting?

Peter Graf: This report is actually launched in an integrated fashion with our financial report. So for example, if I go and look at the overall performance and I?m interested in revenues for example, if I click on that what is happening is that I?m branching out to SAP?s annual report. So, there is no redundancy and the way how these reports are designed you know, there is — from a layout perspective the same kind of branding and so, the two reports are interconnected, so we avoid redundancy.

We are not yet in one report, but we have taken a significant step, because we are launching these reports at the same time on the web and they are linked with each other. So, that?s an intermediate step, but the trend certainly goes to what one report is.

Tom Raftery: Last question, I?m a big user of Twitter and to a lesser extent Facebook as you know and I see a little Fs and Ts up there in the top right. I assume this means that I can take parts of the report and drop them into Twitter and Facebook and I see a LinkedIn link there as well?

Peter Graf: Yes, exactly. So first of all, it?s interesting to see that there are really conversations going on, on the right. People can rate these and you can look at things from a time perspective or most popular. You can always share comments and when you do, you are asked to use your credentials in one of those social websites to go and leave a comment.

So, for example, I can now login in Twitter and use my Twitter account here and sign in. At that point in time, I?m brought back into the application, now I?m logged in into the report and when I share something now, I?m actually putting something out there.

I don?t want to type in this is a test, but when I do, you are getting the question, if you want to tweet it at the same time as leave your comment on the report. And in this way, we get a lot of traffic, because these comments go out on Twitter and on the web into Facebook and people come back to the actual site.

The other beautiful element of the logging in is that you can really ensure that your voice is heard. So for example, this is our materiality matrix and it?s a way for us to have structured feedback from people that go to the report. You can see how over time materiality changed, so things became more important, things became less important and this is a real time feed.

So, I can actually go in, open this matrix and drag and drop points there according to what I think is important for me and for things that I think that are important for SAP. And when I go and save this, very interesting things happen, this data comes back to SAP and we can actually go and look at the navigated view and that?s what I can show you right now.

So, if I go to real time this is the aggregate of all the hundreds of people that went there and communicated to us what they deemed to be important and what not. And people are really making up their mind; there is a lot of ?Yes or No.? It?s pretty clear what?s in and what?s not so important and we like that, they are better — that?s a great feedback for us.

There is one more thing Tom that I would like to highlight, which is the impact we have now taken, not just our own operational impact, but really the impact we have on a greater scale. And we have done some estimates in terms of what is the impact of SAP through its customers on the world.

So, for example, we believe that our sustainable supply chain solution help about 800 million consumers live safer and healthier. In other words, the product safety capabilities that SAP brings to the table combined with the large amount of customers in the consumer space of SAP have delivered significant value to everybody and that?s how we are describing that.

These are estimates and we want people to comment to how we get to the number, because we explain it in detail, this is how we get to this number and we really would like more feedback from everybody in terms of how we measure that and how that could be improved.

So, if anyone has a comment, please leave it up here.

Tom Raftery: Cool, Peter that?s been fantastic. Thanks a million for that, thanks for coming on the show.

HP’s shrinking wallflower attitude may not be Sustainable!

March 24, 2011 by Tom Raftery

HP CEO L?o Apotheker addressing the HP Summit

So I wrote a post the other day entitled Have HP?s senior executives lost interest in Sustainability? after attending a HP event in San Francisco. It was a little unfair because I concentrated on the lack of mentions of Sustainability by senior management on the first day of the event while leaving out the fact that I had interesting discussions with people involved in sustainability initiatives within HP the following day.

One of those I talked to at the event, Deb Lyons, was concerned enough by my piece that she went to the trouble of emailing me some of HP’s more impressive Green initiatives:

HP published a fascinating paper [PDF] to quantify the carbon savings associated with switching from analog to digital printing and came up with a savings of somewhere between 114-251 MMtCO2 eq per annum (MMt CO2 is million metric tonnes of CO2) – similar to the savings which would be achieved by a broad implementation of lighting automation or extensive implementation of telecommuting!
When printing is absolutely necessary, HP have comprehensive paper conservation and sourcing policies which include “a goal that 40 percent or more of the HP branded paper sold will be Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified or have more than 30 percent post-consumer waste content by the end of 2011”, an Eco Printing Assessment for customers and a reduction of paper shipped “in the box”
While HP has yet to release its 2010 CSR report, its 2009 one is online and, in fairness, it is one of the better CSR reports produced by a tech co. (though it has a long way to go to catch-up to SAP’s 2010 Sustainability Report, which was released this morning!).
I referenced the fact in my previous post that HP is becoming a devices company (between desktops, laptops, and more recently tablets and smartphones) so it is heartening to see HP have comprehensive policies around sourcing conflict minerals in Africa
and finally, HP announced the other day that it had exceeded its target of reducing the energy footprint of its products by 40% by the end of 2011 and now HP products are 50% more energy efficient than they were five years ago. The release from HP went on to assert that “if all makes and models of printers, notebook and desktop PCs, displays and servers shipped in 2005 were recycled and replaced with new HP energy-efficient models, customers could save approximately $10.4 billion in energy costs, and avoid more than 40 million metric tons of CO2 emissions within a year” – a pretty impressive numbers!

Another release Deb pointed out to me was an announcement that HP are helping Shell extract oil and gas more efficiently from the ground – personally I believe that any technology which helps increase the amount of fossil fuels we burn should be criminalised, not praised, but that’s just me!

So, leaving aside the oil and gas announcement, HP’s green credentials do appear to be completely genuine, laudable even.

Kudos to HP for these and their other Green initiatives – however, I still believe it was a mistake for their executives not to have them as a theme running through their talks. I understand the HP thinking that “Sustainability is part of our DNA, so much so that we take it for granted that it is built-in to everything we do” – I’m paraphrasing liberally. But, the issue is that if your executives are not talking about sustainability, your stakeholders may not be as convinced about your commitment to sustainability. If Sustainability was left out of the talks because there was a lot of content to be worked in which had to be prioritised, just how far down the list of HP’s priorities does Sustainability lie? From talking to HP, I know it is not far down at all, but listening to their executives, you would not get that impression.

HP has a messaging problem around Sustainability. It isn’t that they don’t do Sustainability, it is just that they seem to be shy about talking about it. With the rise and rise of Ethical Consumerism, this shrinking wallflower attitude may not be Sustainable!

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The kind of commitment to sustainability which Xerox demonstrates is very rare. It should be the norm.

January 27, 2011 by Tom Raftery

I had a phone call recently with Patty Calkins. Patty is Vice President of Environmental Health & Safety for Xerox Corp. I knew Xerox had a good environmental record but until talking to Patty, I had no idea just how good!

To put this in context, let’s take a quick look at how long they have been thinking about their environmental impact, as a company –

Xerox invented double-sided copying in 1969
In the early 1970’s Xerox introduced the 1st post consumer recycled paper products
In early 1980’s Xerox introduced products which automatically powered down (before Energy Star program was conceived)
Xerox was a founder member of Energy Star
In the 1980’s Xerox started rolling out its supplier requirements program
In early 1990’s Xerox started focussing in on the end-of-life of products in the design phase – designing in end-of-life considerations for asset re-use.
In late 90’s Xerox established a waste-free platform to design waste-free products, to manufacture in waste-free facilities, to enable waste free customer sites.
Then Xerox initiated a cartridge return program so Xerox designed cartridges for remanufacturing
In the early 2000’s Xerox kicked off its carbon footprint reduction program – called Energy Challenge 2012. The initial goal was for Xerox to reduce its Carbon Footprint by 10%, over its 2002 base year, by 2012, in absolute terms. By engaging the workforce, Xerox managed to shoot right by that target and hit 18% reductions by 2006. Xerox then upped it’s CO2 reduction target to to 25% by 2012. As of 2010 blew past that goal achieving 30% reductions against its 2002 baseline. Now Xerox are in the process of re-baselining because of the acquisition of Affiliated Computer Systems in early 2010. Xerox will use its 2010 figures to establish a new baseline and will announce its next carbon reduction goal.

Given such a stellar record, I shouldn’t have been surprised at how seriously they take sustainability at Xerox, but I was. Why? The phone call with Patty was incredibly information dense but I’ll try to sum up some of Xerox sustainability highlights.

Most organisations have far more print capability than they need and the print devices they have have an average utilisation rate of around 1-2%. The rest of the time, they are still drawing power, requiing maintenance, etc. To help organisations with this issue, Xerox works with their clients advising them how best to replace stand-alone fax machines, printers and copiers with shared multi-function devices. Xerox took it a step further and developed their Sustainability Calculator – which allows companies to do before and after scenarios to see potential savings and also to subsequently qualify savings from ‘right-sizing’ their print infrastructure.

Xerox Sustainability Calculator

Again on the customer saving front, Xerox developed solid ink technology. This is where they supply ink for printers in solid waxy cubes. The ink melts in special wells in the printer and can then be printed onto paper. The advantage of the solid ink technology is there are no ink-jet cartridges, or laser toner cartridges to dispose of/recycle, and less packaging, transport and storage. In fact, solid ink generatres 90% less waste than laser cartridges. Over the product?s entire life, it actually consumes roughly 30% less overall energy and Earth?s resources than an equivalent color laser printer according to this peer reviewed report [PDF] on the lifecycle impact of solid ink.

Then around five years ago Xerox decided to take a step back to re-examine its aims and to see what is the ‘next plateau’ to reach for in this space.

Xerox mapped it’s complete environmental footprint, identified the significant environmental aspects, went out and tested it against various stakeholders, processed the data and organised it into newer sustainability framework which now consists of 4 planks (with associated goals):

Climate protection and energy with a goal to ultimately become carbon neutral (no date yet set so the top priority for now is to reduce energy consumption)
Preserving biodiversity in world’s forests by driving towards a sustainable paper cycle
Preserving clean air and clean water – 2 goals i) zero persistant bioaccumulative and toxic material and ii) to become water neutral and
Waste prevention and management with the goal of designing waste-free products, to manufacture waste-free facilities, to enable waste-free customer sites

According to Patty, Xerox have (funded by the Xerox foundation) spent millions on research into preserving the world’s biodiversity and turning that research into action in partnership with The Nature Conservancy.

And Xerox have been extensively researching the health impacts of human exposure to toner for the last 30 years. Perhaps unsurprisingly given it is Xerox they say it is not harmful – the difference here though is that they can back up this claim with peer reviewed studies on over 30,000 people over 30 years. Hard to argue with that!

The kind of commitment to sustainability which Xerox demonstrates is very rare. It should be the norm. Hopefully the more Xerox tell their story, the more they will inspire others to shine too.

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Photo credit Craig A Rodway

IBM launches city simulation game, CityOne.

January 25, 2011 by Tom Raftery

IBM recently launched a game called CityOne.

I saw this game demo’d when I was at the Smarter Industries Symposium in Barcelona and I promised myself I’d go back and look at it in more detail.

This morning I sat down with CityOne and took it for a spin.

CityOne registration wall

CityOne is a simulation game where you are the CEO of a city and you have to make decisions on how to react to events that arise, with the help of consultants. The four silos of the city you manage are Energy, Water, the Retail industry and Banking.

Your Mission, according to the website is to

Solve real-world business, environmental and logistical problems. Learn how technology can revolutionize these industries. Explore ways to accelerate process change, integrate with trading partners, and control costs with a flexible IT infrastructure.

The first hurdle you face, if you want to play CityOne, is a daunting Registration Wall. As you can see from the screencap on the right I circled (in red) all the mandatory fields and there’s quiet a few of them. I’d love to know what the bounce rates are for this page because I suspect the vast majority of people, when faced with this kind of screen, don’t bother completing it, and head off to another site.

Then again, perhaps this is the thinking behind the Registration Wall – keep out the riff-raff. Only the most determined will fill out the form and proceed to the game and these are probably who IBM are most interested in talking to.

As you can see from the video above, the game itself is quite slick – throwing up new scenarios at you at every new turn. You are advised by a consultant and given three options to choose from. Depending on your choices, you are awarded points and the happiness index of the population and business, goes up, or down.

A quick hint at this point – if you want to do well in this game – look for the solution which most closely represents an IBM product or service (if you are not sure, look for the magic IBM terms Instrument, Manage, Integrate, Innovate, Optimise and Transform!).

IBM missed an opportunity here, I feel.

They spent a lot of money on this game but it feels too focussed on IBM solutions – had they gone for a less sales-y feel (even the Registration Wall looks like it is designed to be a sales lead generator) then this could have gone viral quite quickly. As it is, I think it will fall into the category of near-miss.

Lockheed Martin Going Green!

January 12, 2011 by Tom Raftery

When you hear the name Lockheed Martin – you don’t immediately think “Ah, now there’s a Green company” – they are after all, among the very largest defence contractors in the world. In 2008 70% of Lockheed Martin’s revenues came from military sales.

However, after a recent discussion with Dr David Constable, Lockheed Martin’s VP for Energy, Environment, Safety and Health, my impression of the company’s Green credentials has definitely gone up a couple of notches.

Lockheed Martin started their Go Green program in 2008 partially out of a desire to ‘do the right thing’ according to Dr Constable but also in response to increasing concern on their customer’s part to sustainability.

Submarine launch of a Lockheed Trident missile

The US military, for example – America’s largest energy consumer, invested $2.7 billion last year to improve energy efficiency according to President Obama. The US Army’s Environmental Command (the US Army has an Environmental Command? Who knew?) has a comprehensive page of Sustainability Links to How-To Guides, Tools and relevant Green departments, facilities and organisations.

Similarly, the UK’s Ministry of Defence, and Royal Mail, two other large Lockheed Martin customers, both asked Lockheed Martin to participate in the Carbon Disclosure Project. According to Dr Constable, in their first year of disclosure, Lockheed Martin were amongst the top performers in their sector and, he said, this next year they aim to improve on that.

With it’s Go Green initiative, Lockheed Martin set itself a goal of reducing its carbon footprint, water footprint and waste-to-landfill footprint by 25% in absolute terms (i.e. not tied to sales revenue) compared to its 2007 baseline, by 2012. For a company with 136,000 employees, 572 facilities in 500 cities and 46 states throughout the U.S. and business locations in 75 nations and territories – this is an ambitious undertaking.

According to Dr Constable though, Lockheed Martin have already met their aim to reduce their water footprint by 25%, they are at 24% waste-to-landfill reduction and 15% carbon emissions reduction. “By definition, being sustainable is a lower cost option”, said Dr Constable, “and the biggest opportunity is in carbon reduction.”

Lockheed have taken a very comprehensive approach to energy efficiency and conservation. Part of it comes from strategic purchasing decisions – buying servers, routers, etc. which are more energy efficient and also purchasing renewable energy – Lockheed Martin are in the top 50 purchasers of renewable power in the US. Lockheed are also using video conferencing technologies more to reduce emissions associated with travel.

With a large portfolio of buildings on its books, LEED certification also plays a large part of Lockheed’s efforts. In fact, Lockheed have a corporate functional procedure (a written policy) in place which mandates that all new construction and renovation above $5 million has to achieve LEED Silver status. Lockheed currently have 19 LEED certified buildings and ‘a lot more in the works’.

Lockheed’s biggest challenges in its Go Green program, according to Dr Constable are getting to grips with the global supply chain – he is currently working with his Global Supply Chain Operations team to address that and they are looking at tools to help them understand the impacts of supply chains.

It remains to be seen if Lockheed Martin will achieve their aim of a 25% reduction in their carbon emissions by 2012 – but to-date they have made a very good start and we have a saying in Irish Tosach maith, leath no hoibre – (a good start is half the work).

And if defence contractors are starting to go Green – that’s reason to be optimistic, right there.

F-22A Photo credit Ronnie Macdonald

Are SAP execs really committed to Sustainability?

December 14, 2010 by Tom Raftery

I attended SAP’s 2010 Influencer Summit last week in Santa Clara and was quite impressed by the quality (though not necessarily the quantity) of the Sustainability-related information which was imparted there.

The event got off to a very good start when the company’s co-CEO, Jim Hagemann Snabe, addressed the event remotely from Germany instead of flying in. Now, while this was not specifically for sustainability-related reasons, it does clearly demonstrate that physical presence is not a necessity in addressing conferences. Even more heartening was to hear Jim referring to Sustainability themes in his keynote (I attended a Symantec event a few weeks back where the CEO and business unit leads made no mention of Sustainability, at all!).

However, following Jim’s talk, the execs who spoke after him made no reference, at all to Sustainability which was a big missed opportunity. SAP’s Rainer Zinow, for example, mentioned that the new version of SAP’s Netweaver product had been optimised for cloud and for multi-core architectures. When I asked him subsequently if it were also more energy efficient, he said “Absolutely” and offered to get me the info. This fact was confirmed to me the following day by Peter Graf in an energy efficiency event I attended.

Why wasn’t it part of the talk though – even if only a throwaway comment?

Scott Bolick at the 2010 SAP Influencer Summit

In fairness to SAP, there was a full Sustainability track the first afternoon with talks from SAP’s Peter Graf, Scott Bolick, Jeremiah Stone and Sami Muneer amongst others but how hard would it have been for the likes of Vishal Sikka, Sanjay Poonen or Raj Nathan, all of whom spoke after Jim Hagemann Snabe, to even throw in a sop to Sustainability in their presentations, even if only to keep the thought alive until the afternoon track.

The fact that the only senior manager to address sustainability was Jim Hagemann Snabe (with the exception of the Sustainability team, obviously), could lead one to wonder if Jim is alone in SAP in his commitment to Sustainability.

Having talked to many of the SAP execs about Sustainability over the years, I know this is not the case. But others present who haven’t had those conversations might now be wondering.

SAP Sustainability Report 3rd quarter updates

December 1, 2010 by Tom Raftery

I have posted here in the past on just how way ahead of the pack SAP’s 2009 Sustainability Report is, however having gone through it in detail when it came out, I didn’t revisit it much until the other day.

Why did I go back to visit the Sustainability Report again recently? Because I was on a call with SAP’s Chief Sustainability Officer, Peter Graf who was telling me about the updates to the report.

SAP's CSO, Peter Graf

“Updates to a Sustainability Report?” I hear you say – yes, SAP are publishing quarterly updates on their Sustainability Report site – one of the advantages of having their report on a website, as opposed to a PDF, is the ability to update it regularly (another advantage is to be able to use website analytics software to see what aspects of the report are generating the most interest).

Anyway, I digress! While chatting to Peter on the call I realised that SAP have been populating the the updates, not just with data but also with SAP Sustainability news stories, many of which I had missed during the year! In case you have too – here’s a quick rundown of them:

SAP was named as the highest ranking software company in the 2010 Dow Jones Sustainability Index – this is the fourth consecutive year SAP has been in the number one spot here.
SAP Americas headquarters achieved a LEED Platinum certification – this is the highest rating given by the US Green Building Council (USGBC) for low impact buildings
SAP released version 5.0 of its Carbon Impact OnDemand software. The latest version includes language support for more than 50 countries, automated data collection and strategies for energy and emissions reduction
The Carbon Disclosure Project announced a new service – the CDP Reporter Service. This consists of an emissions reporting tool (a light version of SAP Carbon Impact OnDemand) to collate and prepare emissions data for disclosure and verification as well as an enhanced analytics tool (based on SAP software) “to maximise the value of CDP?s global climate change data set for benchmarking purposes.

and finally

SAP has published a version of their Sustainability Report in Spanish. According to Peter, Spanish was the foreign language most in demand by SAP’s customers and more languages are coming soon.

Some great news there – and another good reason to keep checking back on the SAP Sustainability Report!

Photo credits Tom Raftery

Symantec need to stop hiding their Green light under a bushel

October 6, 2010 by Tom Raftery

I attended Symantec’s Vision 2010 event in Barcelona yesterday and I found it to be hugely frustrating!

Symantec are one of the world’s largest computer security companies with 31,000 customers, 18,400 employees (PDF), and revenue in 2009 of $6.2 billion.

At yesterday’s Vision event however, they missed lots of great opportunities to talk up their Green story! I sat through the keynote from CEO Enrique Salem and presentations from the business unit leads and there was not one mention of the word Sustainability or even Green.

Deepak Mohan at Symantec Vision 2010

Deepak Mohan, SVP of the Information Management Group came closest when he mentioned efficiencies associated with de-duplication, eliminating redundancy, reducing data transfer and more efficient (that word again) search. Guys, these are obvious Green wins!

Things improved considerably in the afternoon when Fujitsu, a Symantec customer, spoke about the payback from installing a hosted email filtering solution from Symantec. Before the installation, Fujitsu were receiving in excess of 2m emails per day. Between 90-95% of these emails were spam. After the rollout of the email filtering solution, Fujitsu are now receiving 5-10% of their previous email load per day. As a consequence they were able to reduce their email infrastructure from sixteen servers down to two. Furthermore, they were able to reduce their network link requirements and their storage requirements for email. And finally they were able to free up IT resources who previously were tasked with managing the email infrastructure. This is a big Green win!

My Symantec Vision 2010 conference badge

Later in the afternoon I was especially heartened to have a one-to-one session with Symantec VP of Global Solutions, Jose Iglesias. Jose is the guy raising/waving the Green flag within Symantec. He informed me that Symantec have used their own technologies to reduce the electricity bill in their data centers by $3m (10%) per annum!

How do they do this?
Symantec has software for helping manage computer clusters which can help you reduce the number of computers in a cluster without affecting your SLA’s.

Also, according to Jose, storage costs can represent between 25-75% of a data center’s energy spend. To help with this Symantec have storage management products which give deep visibility of use of storage. This can highlight overallocation, help reclaim storage space and defer the purchase of new storage.

Other technologies like dynamic storage tiering can significantly reduce the amount of energy used in storage while data deduplication can free up large amounts of disk space.

Symantec also have software which can put computers to sleep after a set period of inactivity and they have partnered with TechTurn to manage end of life computers

Finally, Symantec see a large role for themselves in helping secure the Smart Grid.

With all these Green credentials, why aren’t Symantec screaming their Sustainability story from the rooftops?

Possibly because they don’t see it as core to their customers’ needs. That is changing. Fast.

Another good reason for Symantec to strt talking up their Green credentials is that companies with a good record on Sustainability have an easier time attracting and retaining employees – something which is vital to the long-term sustainability of any company.

I’ll be at IBM Start this week (and next!)

September 6, 2010 by Tom Raftery

Photo credit Tom Raftery (me!)

IBM are hosting a 9 day Sustainability Summit at Start in the UK this week (and next obviously!).

Start is an initiative inspired by the Prince of Wales Charities Foundation to help people “lead more sustainable lives and to show what a more energy efficient, cleaner and healthier future could look like”.

IBM are leading the business part of the Summit and they have a great line-up of topics:

Day 1 – Smarter Cities for a Sustainable Future
Day 2 – Smarter Energy for a Sustainable Future
Day 3 – Smarter Transport for a Sustainable Future
Day 4 – People and Skills for a Sustainable Future
Day 5 – Start Young for a Sustainable Future
Day 6 – Smarter Supply Chains for a Sustainable Future
Day 7 – Finance and Sustainability
Day 8 – Smarter Analytics for a Sustainable Future
Day 9 – Smarter Business for a Sustainable Future

I’m not going to be able to attend days 4-6 but am really looking forward to the other sessions – sustainability geekery heaven!

I’ll have camera equipment with me and although the sessions themselves are being held under Chatham House Rules, I’ll be sure to nab interviews with as many of the attendees as I can!

You will be able to follow the non-Chatham House Rules talks on Twitter using the hashtag #ibmstart starting on Wednesday this week (Sept 8th) and continuing on until Thursday next week (Sept 16th).

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